Niantic CEO John Hanke talked about the Metaverse in his speech at the Augmented World Expo. The Metaverse reminds me of Neal Stephenson, William Gibson, and the movie The Matrix.
“The world is so chaotic in fictional futures that people will need to escape into some kind of virtual reality to live, work and play. Now, I would like to ask everyone.
Is that the future you imagine? And does that apply to your children as well?
No, this is not the future we at Niantic believe will happen," Hanke said.
Niantic recently unveiled its platform in a new software development package called the Lightship Augmented Reality Developer's Kit. The Lightship ARDK contains many of the systems used to develop the company's AR games, Pokémon Go and Pikmin Bloom. The company hopes these tools will help developers create augmented reality content. Taking things a step further, Hanke today announced that the Lightship ARDK will be able to access something called the Niantic Map. Hanke continues:
"AR's grand challenge is to map the world. Responding to a sustained, shared interpretation of reality, anchoring things there, bringing multiplayer content, real-time mapping, understanding, and You can blend it with the world, and when you do that, you can have an experience that's tailored to a particular place in the world.We have a version of that and it works. .
To illustrate this map, Hanke introduces Niantic's new app that combines the concept of real-world maps and geocaching. Geocaching is a global activity that resembles a giant scavenger hunt where people hide objects and notes to find and distribute their GPS coordinates to the public. Niantic's new game is based on the same concept, but uses AR objects instead. The demo showed one player putting a card into a hole at the bottom of the statue while another player scoured the area to find the card.
After demonstrating the map, Hanke also talked about this responsibility.
"While we are excited about what this technology can do and what developers around the world can do with AR, we recognize that this next step in computing comes with great responsibility." .
Returning to the sci-fi dystopia theme I mentioned earlier, Hanke warns of the dangers of unscrupulous players in the AR world.
"Think of the wearable devices you wear all day long. If they're on your head, they'll usually know where you're looking. They might also know things like your heart rate." What happened physiologically when you saw a product or advertisement, did your heart rate go up, what if you saw a person, your glasses might recognize that person, your What happens to your heart rate?Do your pupils dilate when you look at other people?How do you feel?We're getting pretty good at predicting that too, so this isn't sci-fi. What I just described can be done by engineers right now.”
After issuing the warning, Hanke summed up the keynote positively.
"Of course we don't think it has to be that way. It's up to us, but we don't have to go in that direction. At Niantic, we take the best this world has to offer and push it even higher." , and the choices we make to use this technology in incredibly positive ways that certainly envision a future that we can all bring together, bring people together, have fun, and share experiences. It's there to bring us together, not to divide us."
The Lightship ARDK is available now, and Niantic's map will be in their devkit next year.
[via VentureBeat] @VentureBeat
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